Frank Ludolph wrote: > Glynn Foster wrote: >> Calum Benson wrote: >> >>> On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 22:18 -0700, Niall Power wrote: >>> >>> >>>> I don't know of any reliable way to determine how long the app is >>>> going to take to come up. >>>> >>> AFAIK the usual way isn't to guess how long it will take to come up, but >>> to fire off a background timer as soon as possible in the startup >>> process, and show the splash if the first window hasn't appeared within >>> N seconds of the timer starting. (You also need to set a minimum >>> duration that the splash screen should appear for, rather than just >>> having it disappear when the first window appears... otherwise it might >>> disappear moments after it appeared, which looks sloppy.) >>> >> >> I think I'd personally rather see a lighter-weight animated hourglass with >> the >> introduction of Xcursor, than a splash screen. >> > Changing the cursor to an hourglass when the user d-clicks a desktop > icon essentially "locks" access to the entire desktop - a wait cursor > tells the user that the object under the mouse pointer is not ready to > receive user inputs. Although users seldom do anything other than wait > for the applications (installer) to startup, they may need access to > task management tools or a terminal if something goes wrong, so > (apparently) locking the desktop is the wrong thing to do. > > I agree that splash screens are a hack. The best thing an application > can do is display a window frame as quickly as possible, even if it is > empty, while it completes initialization. The cursor can then change > to a wait cursor while over that window frame. > > I'll remove the "splash screen" entry from the roadmap while keeping > in mind the need for responsive user feedback.
An alternative way to display a splash screen quickly would be to have a tiny binary that does nothing other than use X-Toolkit (not Gtk) to plonk an overrideredirect window frame with a bitmap image on it for a few seconds. Using the X-Toolkit libs will be fast and it should be possible to display a splash screen within a couple of seconds (considering the CDROM will be spun down). Regards, Moinak. > > Frank > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > caiman-discuss mailing list > caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss >
